TweakTown News Posts - Page 2267

Despite this news heavily circulating the web recently, it turns out that apparently AMD has no definitive plans to dabble long term in the DDR3 memory market. This comes as quite the surprise, though, given AMD even had a dedicated page on their own site indicating three new Radeon branded memory series in the lineup that looked to be aimed directly at the consumer market.

As it so turns out, the AMD Radeon branded modules spotted in random stores in Japan and even reports of some having been seen in Canada, were supposedly entered into the retail market in minimal quantity to ascertain whether or not it was a viable venture for AMD to distribute the series' through channel partners in the future.

Acer's beefy Iconia Smart smartphone with 4.8-inch sized touch screen is finally looking to launch around mid-September, this after much anticipation for months since its Europe unveiling back in February.

A new trailer for upcoming gravity-defying third person shooter, INVERSION has just come out which showcases its intensive "drop-in, drop-out" co-op multiplayer mode.

This game looks to be polishing up extremely well and is expected to make quite the impact on he third person shooter genre upon release; scheduled for February 7, 2012 on PS3 and 360 in the states, and February 10 in Europe.

NVIDIA have published their earnings for their latest fiscal quarter (ending July 31) and have done a glorious job amongst all the rubble that is the stock market right now. With a revenue of $1.017 billion and an income of $151.6 million, that gives them a gross margin for Q2 2011 of 51.7-percent. Compared to last year in the same time where they saw a $141 million net loss.

NVIDIA CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang says that the revenue growth is from "consumer demand for notebooks powered by our GeForce GPU, with its unique Optimus technology" - surprisingly, not the Tegra 2 processors that seem to be powering virtually every iPad competitor. NVIDIA expects revenue for the ongoing quarter to be up 4 to 6-percent from the previous quarter.

We are very happy to announce that TweakTown's very first eBook is live and now on sale.

It is titled "TweakTown's Ultimate Guide to PC Cases" and was written by our very own case and cooling expert Chad Sebring. The extensive book goes into detail about all things cases and which is the best to buy and much more.

Ice Cream Sandwich has been getting some sweet action lately and now it seems there are some leaked screenshots showing the next-gen OS from Google. As you can see from the below shots, the notification bar has received an overhaul, as well as leaving room for bigger icons and updates. The app drawer has gotten an makeover, with different headers for apps and widgets and an integrated link to the market for easy access.

The IRK36b build packs the following:

Brand-new launcher and app drawer interface

Will launch with Google Shopper and support NFC-capable devices

Gmail has been totally re-themed to match ICS (not pictured)

Nexus S will be receiving ICS via update, but the "Nexus Prime" will be getting it first

Mostly UI changes - many older devices should be able to run it

The apps on the homescreen may be "stackable"

Google search bar embedded at the top of the homescreen, a la Honeycomb

The iPhone 5 is slowly getting more details leaked about it and it was only last month that the design specification which claimed to be for the iPhone 5 leaked out from Chinese case manufacturers. Now we're seeing some proper mock-ups from 3D modelling software and the iPhone 5 seems to be a slight change over the iPhone 4 and even features some Samsung Galaxy S II-esque designs.

As you can see from the above picture, the iPhone 5 could be thinner and have a larger display. It also sports a larger home button and dives away from its usual circular design to more of a rectangle shape, ala the Samsung Galaxy S II. For all the bitching Apple did with Samsung "copying their design", you would think they would not use a home button that resembles the second- most powerful smartphone maker in the world's phone. Tsk, tsk, Apple.

SteelSeries are set to launch another mouse onto the market but this one is just a little different. It sports an actual 32-bit ARM processor, as fast as the 1994-based Intel Pentium 75MHz. This gives the Sensei double the sensitivity over most other mice. Also included are three different "zones" on the Sensei that can be individually programmed in 16.8 million colors; alternatively, they can be totally disabled.

The Sensei also sports a non-slip metal coat and is ambidextrous, it also includes 7 ergonomically placed, programmable buttons. What blows me away is, the built-in driver can be adjusted through an LCD menu on the backside of the mouse! The true hardware-based sensitivity settings allow a CPU from 1 to 5,700 and it also includes an "overclocked" Double CPI feature that allows the mouse to crank all the way to an insane 11,400 DCPI.

Samsung has launched its new PM830 series of solid state drives today which are the first SATA-III 6Gb/s drives from the company.

They are 2.5-inch sized drives and use 20nm MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory with a toggle DDR interface and AES 256-bit encryption.

Samsung promises read and write rates of up to 500MB/sec and 350MB/sec respectively. Capacities on offer in the series are 128GB, 256GB and 512GB.

Samsung's new line up of advanced SSDs will raise the performance bar to the next level for ultra-slim notebooks and tablets and accelerate growth of the market for high-performance SSDs," said Wanhoon Hong, executive vice president, memory sales & marketing, Device Solutions, Samsung Electronics. "The industry is expected to quickly embrace SATA 6Gb/s-based SSDs, which also will help increase market interest in 256GB and higher densities significantly.

Sample production on the PM830 series SSDs began in May and volume production was initiated earlier this month.